Kitchen Sink Realism

5 Key excerpts on "Kitchen Sink Realism"

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  The Intersection of Class and Space in British Postwar Writing

  Kitchen Sink Aesthetics

  • Simon Lee(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is perhaps most appropriate to consider Kitchen Sink Realism as a refinement of prior realisms rather than as a retort, a correction, or a break. Texts of the movement tend to expose the limits of aesthetic realism by taking an active turn toward the political. It is, of course, too reductive to suggest that prior realisms centered on aesthetics in such a way that they reduced texts to a state of purely institutional or academic interest. The chief characteristics associated with realism—a shift away from the sensational toward something like documentary-style objectivity—are characteristics that parallel the development of the modern novel. Yet, the texts of the kitchen sink era do seem to view such realisms skeptically. Arguably, these texts are elevated and cerebral, but written with a working-class audience in mind rather than a more academic readership or as texts that simply feature working-class characters. Whereas realist novels of the past aimed for maximal narrative objectivity, Kitchen Sink Realism’s politicization of the aesthetic mode grants the text a more subversive mien.

  The growth of realism is generally read as a response to dominant romantic tropes. However, the evolution of the mode implies a continued effort to recalibrate aesthetic and political imperatives by merging form with function. While the early British Romantics such as William Wordsworth sought to democratize representation through the use of vernacular and a heightened focus on the ordinary, the Victorian period can be seen as an elaboration rather than a break. It was more the propensity for detailed storytelling seen in the popularity of serialized fiction and the dramatic monologue—rather than a concerted effort to dethrone the Romantic tradition—that helped define realist fiction. Since both the Romantics and the Victorians saw literary texts as didactic and utilitarian, any aesthetic progress between the two is best read as a desire to improve the social function of imaginative writing. Therefore, the social novel’s dedication to realism can be read as an evolution of the Romantics’ celebration of the ordinary, and Kitchen Sink Realism can be viewed as a further evolution of this same thought.

  As Mucignat indicates, spatial representation in realist novels was used more to serve the plot which held primacy. In Kitchen Sink Realism, spatial details and descriptions surpass narrative function, moving closer to Barthes’s notion of superfluous. This is due, in part, to the fact that a number of the key kitchen sink texts were conceived as vignettes—short pieces that, by design, would necessitate discreet, regular mentions of setting and environment. But it is likely also because kitchen sink texts are of their moment—they do not project into the past or the future, emphasizing instead their world as experienced in the contextual present. The result is a steady, rhythmic pattern of environmental detail. So, it is possible to consider how kitchen sink’s heightened emphasis on spatial representation acts in a manner similar to Barthes’s superfluous—a feature designed to bring about the reality effect through self-referentiality. That is to say, representations of space and place in kitchen sink texts surpass mere formalities; instead, they signal the important role of environmental details as part of the movement’s aesthetic program. By moving away from the idea that depicted space is little more than a stage for the story, the effect is that characters engage with spaces more readily—space shifts from a formal feature to an active, functional component of the realist technique. Such a development can be understood as part of the evolutionary process of realism, to naturalism, to social realism, and, eventually, to Kitchen Sink Realism.

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  Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies

  • Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman, Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14 Like Lefebvre, Harvey (2006) considers how the environment analogizes manifestations of capital, and the use of aesthetic grit amplifies such distinctions. Harvey picks up where Lefebvre left off, developing the link between urbanism and capitalism to uncover differential spaces of contention. Whereas Lefebvre posited space as the result of a dialectical triad, Harvey develops this concept further by adding three more categories to merge with perceived, conceived, and representational space, resulting in a nine-way matrix. By complicating his original approach, Harvey offers a more nuanced way of conceiving of Lefebvre’s slippery ‘lived space’ category—the immaterial component of space structured upon social interactions and negotiations.

  15 The British New Wave is the cinematic counterpart to the literature and theater production of the kitchen sink movement. Many of the novels and films of the period were transformed into screenplays by the original writers, teaming up with directors like Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and A Taste of Honey (1961) all balanced aesthetic interests with social and ethically minded intent.

  16 As discussed prior, and well outlined in work by Higson (1996) and Lay (2002), kitchen sink texts built on documentary motifs as well as the use of taboo subject matter. However, I would argue that kitchen sink texts amplify the use of space and setting to place working-class characters into stark relief for close analysis.

  17 Whereas the kitchen sink movement was arguably more political than commercial, Coronation Street

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  Reading the American Novel 1865 - 1914

  • G. R. Thompson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Of Realism and Reality Definitions and Contexts

  As a literary term, realism normally refers to a theory and practice of fiction in which the artistic goal is to portray “life as it is” – rather than intensified or as it should be – and in simple direct language rather than striving for striking metaphors and indulging in rhetorical flourishes. The elevated subject matter of classic tragedy, or the poetic elements of optative romanticism, or the sentimental aspects of domestic novels and romances, or the hair-raising events of gothic romances were to be downplayed or avoided in favor of the everyday, average, prosaic aspects of life.

  Realism in this sense was especially prominent in France, England, the United States, and Russia from about the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond). But there are realistic, mimetic elements in works written centuries before: in the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. eighth century bc), in the plays of Sophocles (496–406 BC), in Boccaccio's Decameron tales (1351–1353) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), in the plays of Shakespeare (1564–1616) and other Renaissance dramatists. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) presents a hybrid form of a romance and novel in which the interplay of worldviews is centrally informed by the mixture of realism with idealized romanticism. Many consider this seventeenth-century work the cornerstone of the modern novel.

  In the English-speaking world, literary historians generally point to the principal eighteenth-century British novelists as anticipating the nineteenth century in the development of modern realism. In American literature, the primary meaning of realism indicates a period: the historical era from about a decade after the American Civil War to a decade or two after World War I.1 But literary realism, even when confined to a historical period, is not a single undiversified idea or theoretical program or movement. In both Britain and America, major fictional forms partaking of both realism and romance included the domestic novel , the novel of manners , and the sentimental novel . In America there was an important, predominantly realist, movement toward regionalism , within which broad rubric a form called local color is sometimes distinguished. Both centrally involve a forceful vernacular style (idiomatic spoken language), often in dialect (regional or ethnic idiom). In addition, we can identify, at the minimum, several forms of realist theory and practice in Europe and America: objective realism , compassionate realism , benevolent realism , and sentimental realism . There is also a distinction to be made between intense “social reformist” realism and “quiet” realism. Variations on realism and anti-romance are also in tension with, or in complementary relation to, impressionism and expressionism and most especially naturalism .2

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  The Long Revolution

  • Raymond Williams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Parthian Books

    (Publisher)

  7 Realism and the Contemporary Novel

  The centenary of ‘realism’ as an English critical term occurred but was not celebrated in 1956. Its history, in this hundred years, has been so vast, so complicated and so bitter that any celebration would in fact have turned into a brawl. Yet realism is not an object, to be identified, pinned down and appropriated. It is, rather, a way of describing certain methods and attitudes, and the descriptions, quite naturally, have varied, in the ordinary exchange and development of experience. Recently, I have been reconsidering these descriptions, as a possible way of defining and generalising certain personal observations on the methods and substance of contemporary fiction. I now propose to set down: first, the existing variations in ‘realism’ as a descriptive term; second, my own view of the ways in which the modern novel has developed; third, a possible new meaning of realism.

  There has, from the beginning, been a simple technical use of ‘realism’, to describe the precision and vividness of a rendering in art of some observed detail. In fact, as we shall see, this apparently simple use involves all the later complexities, but it seemed, initially, sufficiently accurate to distinguish one technique from others: realism as opposed to idealisation or caricature. But, also from the beginning, this technical sense was flanked by a reference to content: certain kinds of subject were seen as realism, again by contrast with different kinds. The most ordinary definition was in terms of an ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality, as opposed to traditionally heroic, romantic or legendary subjects. In the period since the Renaissance, the advocacy and support of this ‘ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality’ have been normally associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material was called ‘domestic’ and ‘bourgeois’ before it was called ‘realistic’, and the connexions are clear. In literature the domestic drama and, above all, the novel, both developing in early eighteenth-century England with the rise of an independent middle class, have been the main vehicles of this new consciousness. Yet, when the ‘realist’ description arrived, a further development was taking place, both in content and in attitudes to it. A common adjective used with ‘realism’ was ‘startling’, and, within the mainstream of ‘ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality’ a particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the exposed, the sordid could be distinguished. Realism thus appeared as in part a revolt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world; the realists were making a further selection of ordinary material which the majority of bourgeois artists preferred to ignore. Thus ‘realism’, as a watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary movements.

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  Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context

  [4 volumes]

  • Linda De Roche, Linda De Roche, Linda De Roche(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Dirty Realism

  Coined by Bill Buford in a 1983 issue of Granta, dirty realism refers to a particular form of writing that was prevalent across American fiction in the early 1980s. It sits alongside—and is sometimes used interchangeably with—terms such as Kmart realism, Carverian realism, and minimalism. Buford published stories by seven authors to exemplify his concept: specifically, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Tallent, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tobias Wolff. Furthermore, he suggests that Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, Richard Yates, Jean Thompson, and Stephen Dixon, while not included in the special issue, could also be considered representative of this type of fiction.

  Buford situates dirty realists as distinct from experimental postmodern authors and suggests that “the work of John Barth, William Gaddis, or Thomas Pynchon seem[s] pretentious by comparison.” Rather than “the large historical statement,” dirty realists, he suggests, concern themselves with “the belly-side of contemporary life.” He also distinguishes dirty realists from writers such as John Updike or William Styron, who, he suggests, appear “ornate, even baroque in comparison.” However, dirty realism is “so stylized and particularized [and] . . . so insistently informed by a discomforting and sometimes elusive irony” that it is obvious these writers are indeed concerned with style and form (Buford 1983, 4). An elastic concept, dirty realism has had a lasting impact on contemporary American fiction and is one of the early attempts to announce what fiction could look like after the postmodern era.

  Buford’s article can be seen as the impetus for a wider critical recognition of realism in American fiction throughout the 1980s. Later in the decade there were Keith Opdahl’s essay “The Nine Lives of Literary Realism” (1987) and Tom Wolfe’s manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel” (1989). More recent pronouncements about a contemporary form of realism, such as Mary K. Holland’s idea of “poststructural realism” (Holland 2013, 7), can therefore be considered part of a longer process of critical inquiry that began with Buford’s short introduction to Granta 8

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